Not Cynics; Nihilists

Ezra Klein posts yet another Village piece defending repug terrorists as misguided patriots, and Kevin Drum and Steve Benen respond:

Kevin:

Ezra Klein rounds up a series of quotes from 2001 showing that Republicans loved the idea of fiscal stimulus back when a fellow Republican was wrestling with a recession. But now they hate the idea:

So what happened?

Some say the explanation for all this is obvious: Republicans want the economy to fail because that is how they will defeat President Obama. After all, didn’t Sen. Mitch McConnell say, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president”? How much clearer can it be?

I don’t believe this sort of behavior is quite that cynical.

Well, I think it's exactly that cynical. But not because Republicans want the economy to fail. Self-interest probably motivates them to believe they're doing the right thing when they oppose measures that might help the economy and therefore help President Obama's reelection, but that's about it. They don't literally want the economy to tank.

But the obvious thing Ezra doesn't mention is that all of those 2001 mash notes to stimulus were based on the prospect of getting an even bigger tax cut for the wealthy than they had counted on. Republicans don't really care about stimulus one way or the other. They care about upper-income tax cuts, and back in 2001, portraying them as a stimulus measure was a handy way of getting them passed. If Obama were to offer up the same deal — big, permanent cuts in the top marginal rates — they'd be happy to become Keynesians for a day if that was the price of admission.

Cynical? Sure. But this is all pretty much common knowledge. Republicans like tax cuts for the rich, and they'll adopt whatever argument comes to hand to get them. If we're in a recession, tax cuts are a short-term stimulus measure. If the economy is doing well, tax cuts are a long-term productivity enhancement. If estate taxes are at issue, they're trying to save family farms. If it's capital gains, cuts are a vital tool for energizing our manufacturing base. Any port in a storm.

Steve:

Regular readers know I tend to see the resolution of this question quite differently. Ezra believes GOP officials aren’t that cynical; I believe they’re absolutely that cynical. Indeed, I tend to agree with a different piece Ezra wrote last week, when he argued that the “fundamental fact” of American politics right now is that Republicans are principally concerned with winning in 2012, not fixing the economy. “Boehner,” he wrote, “simply will not cut off his party’s candidates at the knees, especially its presidential contenders, by handing Obama a major economic accomplishment.”

That’s pretty cynical, and I think it’s entirely correct: Boehner is willing to hold back the economy, on purpose, as part of an election strategy.

It’s unlikely Republicans want the country to suffer, per se, but it seems plausible to me that they see this as a temporary approach — they’ll undermine the economy and abandon their previous principles for just a little while, and then see what they can do to help Americans in 2013. They can’t act sooner, though, because it might help Obama.

And they can’t have that.

They're both wrong. The repugs do, indeed, want the economy to crash and the country to fall to its knees. Because only then can they get what they really want: a pure lords-and-serfs economy that will free them forever from even pretending to care about anyone who is not rich, white, straight male Xians like themselves.

Yes, of course, many millions of repugs will find themselves on the serfs end of that deal, but it will come as a huge surprise to them. They all think they're going to be among the one thousand or so lords who will own the rest of us.